Wednesday, April 21, 2010

P126: two notes

P126 is, as we have already noted here, a small papyrus fragment containing parts of Hebrews 13.12-13 and 19-20.There are two points of interest to note:

Although not much text survives (around 25 letters on each side), the upper margin survives and it contains page numbers: 161 and 162. So the last page of Hebrews would be page 162 and we can figure out approximately how much text was on the page 161: approximately 15 lines of NA27 text. Hence, according to the ed. pr., Hebrews would have taken around 45 pages, leaving around 117 pages before Hebrews. So we might be able to imagine what might have preceded Hebrews in this manuscript.There are a few different ways to do this, but nothing obvious springs to mind (Rom & 1 & 2 Cor look too long at this rate to fit into 117 pages). But this is something to ponder.

At Heb 13.12 P126 reads: EXWTHSPULHSTHSPA[REMBOLHS. This would be a kind of conflationary reading (combining the two readings attested as alternatives in other manuscripts), which (as the editor suggests) may have come about through the incorporation into the text of a textual annotation in the exemplar.